Tom: What we set out to do was make the best one-step digestive product available on the market today. We knew from the research on peptides and critical care that it had to be small-chain peptide based. I have investigated just about every small-chain peptide product available on the marketplace,
and we focused in on one made from fish. We are big fans of whole-food nutrition, and we did not want just a protein powder, we wanted a whole-food powder that had a high level of protein predigested into amino acids and small chain peptides. The nice thing about fish is that anything coming out of the ocean has a beautiful mineral component. They also have a beautiful fatty acid component, and we consider these things very complementary to the body’s ability to digest and absorb protein efficiently. The main ingredient was this predigested fish powder that has a high concentration of small chain peptides.
We also learned through our study that probiotics, the beneficial bacteria that help us digest and absorb our food is a huge need for many people suffering digestive issues. Literally, trillions of bacteria live in our digestive tract generally for health.
The beneficial bacteria outnumber and keep in control the detrimental bacteria, but when disease and the use of antibiotics—and other things I am sure your readers are familiar with—cause an imbalance in that good and bad bacteria, we end up with dysbiosis, yeast infections and all kinds of issues. We searched for the most bioactive probiotics product we could find. Interestingly enough, we found it in a product that we import from Australia. The man there takes sea vegetables—which we were excited
about as well—and organic grasses, and he ferments them with a blend of 14 naturally occurring probiotics. We have the peptides, the probiotics, and just a beautiful array of trace minerals and micronutrients in a combination whole food fish, whole food sea vegetable, and organic grass product.
Mike: Wow, that is remarkable. I am genuinely excited about what is in there. Just getting sea vegetables by themselves is usually considered very healthy. The mineral profile by combining that with the predigested protein—no wonder I am getting good results from this. Can you explain to people exactly what you mean by predigested?
Tom: Sometimes I get the question, “Well, should I just eat more fish to get the same results?”
Well, certainly I believe that fish is a good quality food, but if you are not digesting and absorbing the protein in the milk, eggs, chicken, or any other source of protein—if you can’t do that—then you are not going to do any better by eating fish. An intact protein is made up of hundreds of amino acids linked together. When we eat any protein source, even vegetable sources of protein, the body triggers pancreatic enzymes and hydrochloric acid in the stomach and other things that work to digest that protein.
We found companies that have unique technologies based on enzymatic fermentation that, essentially, is the same process the pharmaceutical companies use to make the peptide base enteral feeding formulas.
Just like enzymes do in your body, these laboratory-based enzymes break the protein down to a certain point where we end up with a combination of three amino acids and small chain peptides. People have to be careful in this area. You will find peptide-based products in various body building formulas in the health food store. Yet, if you look at the molecular weights of those peptides, they are still only partially digested proteins. This means when you get down to a small chain peptide of two or three amino
acids, the molecular weight of those peptides is much, much smaller than the various designer proteins you might find in the health food store that are claiming to be peptides. That’s because “peptides” is a poorly defined term. They are not completely pre-digested like the proteins in our product.
Mike: We see that on body-building products—they’ll say micro-filtered and cross-filtered.
Tom: Yes, and the molecular weights are often in, I think, it is a term called “Dacrons” or “Datrons” I forget now exactly. The weight measurement is certainly much larger than what we were looking for.
We did not see a therapeutic advantage to using partially digested proteins over completely digested proteins. I mean, one of the difficult aspects of this product is that you can go into a health food store, buy a whole tub of protein for 20 bucks, and scoop out 40 grams a day for two months. Your cost is then 30 cents a day.
Our retail price is $40 for a bottle of 180 half-gram capsules of protein powder. Even though it is whole-food protein powder, the process of predigesting down to small chain peptides is an extensive process. That is why in the enteral feeding formulas in the hospital, the protein formulas are rarely used because they are about 10 times more expensive than the intact protein formulas.
Mike: I have an explanation that might help readers here: In chemistry, you have O2, oxygen, which is essential for us, but if you add another atom, you have O3, which is extremely dangerous to us. It can burn our lung tissues, right? So it is all oxygen, but it is different chain lengths. Then, you can have carbon monoxide CO, which is a poison to us. It is the same element, but it is how the element is arranged that determines whether it is beneficial or harmful.
Tom: That is an excellent correlation, so let me tie it back to the protein. With leaky gut syndrome and the delayed food allergy problems that we see in natural medicine—it is the kind of case where someone can eat an egg on Friday, then have a delayed response food allergy to the proteins in that egg,
and they end up with a migraine, an attack of arthritis, gout or something three days later—there is no direct correlation. That is because with leaky gut and malabsorption issues, if a long chain peptide is absorbed in the body intact, but incompletely digested, the body sees it as a foreign substance and
has an internal allergic reaction to it. So, longer chain peptides create allergic food allergy problems in the body.
Until the digestive system is working well enough to digest our protein down to the smallest component that it needs—that is, amino acids and small chain peptides—we are running the risk of longer chain peptides—incompletely digested protein—crossing a leaky gut; a gut barrier problem that creates the
food allergy issues that so many alternative doctors deal with.
Mike: That is an excellent point, and I want to mention, too, that also it can result in a lot of joint pain in people.
Tom: The doctors who have inspired me in my work taught me that when somebody has a digestive dysfunction protein metabolism issue, and it is causing an underlying dysfunction in the body, what symptoms any one individual manifests is not a result of the disease that has attacked them, because diseases do not attack.
It is a breakdown of normal function; it is how the genetic predisposition of any one individual will adjust to that underlying problem. You and I could eat the exact same diet, live the exact same lifestyle, and develop the exact same underlying protein absorption issue, and your food allergy issue would be addressed by your body’s balancing and counter-balancing mechanisms directed by your genetics to create the symptoms—we end up calling it chronic fatigue.
Well, maybe with the same initial insult, my genetic predisposition will create the symptoms that maybe we end up seeing as Parkinson’s Disease. The root cause is the body not working right; the body not getting what it needs or not eliminating what it cannot use: gut, liver, gut, liver, gut, liver, and when in doubt, gut liver. They have the body’s balancing and counter-balancing mechanisms which adjust to those underlying problems.
